


I Know the Feeling Haunts You

by polytropic



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Gender Roles, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, hints of domme!Nakia, listen we all saw that video that girl is a Top, toxic masculinity and unlearning it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-27 09:43:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13878273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: It's not easy, trying to build this thing between the three of them. And some of the roadblocks are hard to understand.





	I Know the Feeling Haunts You

**Author's Note:**

> So, first and foremost, I'm white and American: please feel totally free to let me know if anything in here is ignorant, racist, or even just rings wrong to you based on your lived experience. I love these characters and this movie but they're not For Me and I recognize that. I'm trying to do them justice, and I truly do want to hear, and fix it, if I've fallen short.
> 
> Second, this fic discusses some possible differences between US and Wakandan constructions of identity. I'm bi, and I love being bi. I love using the label "bisexual", it makes me happy and helps me celebrate who I am. And I love my masculinity, whether or not I identify as a man at any given moment. But, I'm also pretty clear that the way that I conceptualize my identity is post-colonial; it's been shaped in no small part by the trauma, oppression, and essentialism of centuries of an imperialist, white supremacist hegemony. And I think, in a never-colonized nation, it wouldn't exist in remotely the same way. That's what I've tried to convey here.
> 
> I have no idea where this fic's AU diverged from canon, just that it obviously did at some point. I guess choose your favorite possible "kiss and make up" point and go with that?? I'm sure I'll write a get-together for these three soon.
> 
> And, lastly: how could I NOT name it after "All The Stars" by Kendrick Lamar?

In America, men don't touch each other. 

Nakia thinks about this stark, death-pale fact as she watches T'Challa's face twist from happiness to consternation, and then to confused remorse. His hand, casually outstretched to their mutual love, falls back to his side, and his eyes narrow in assessment that, she knows, will look too much like judgement for Erik to abide. And indeed, the next sound in the suddenly deathly quiet hallway is a quick, vicious "don't fucking  _ do  _ that," and the door slamming. 

T'Challa's jaw clenches hard on one side even as he huffs out a breath of incredulous laughter. 

"I thought we were doing quite well lately."

"Do not take this to heart," she tries, reaching out and capturing the rejected hand. He watches, contemplative and trying not to let the hurt show, as she brings his knuckles to her lips and presses them there, warm. "This isn't about you."

"No?"

"No."

"Please, help me understand."

She lets his hand rest against her pursed mouth as she thinks about how she can possibly do that.

In Wakanda, passion and love are guidance from the goddess Bast, leading humans towards each other to enrich their lives. It is known (so universally that it almost always goes without saying) that gender is among the many things that sometimes kindle that passion, and sometimes are irrelevant to it. 

In America, she knows, it's not like that. There, love and the particularities of that love are not just a feeling, an action, a conversation: they characterize. Individuals move through their passions with the understanding that they say something about them on a fundamental level, a level of identities. And those identities come with status ("straight") or danger ("queer")...and everything, all of it, comes with shame. 

T'Challa knows this too, of course. But he hasn't lived it, before now: has never seen shame rise up and strangle his lover in the middle of a gesture, yank their voice from their throat and the light from their eyes. Nakia has. In Denver, a sweet but fleeting lover's cheek turns sharply away from her lips, a hiss of discomfort escaping her; in Atlanta, men call things out at them from across the street and the girl who has been flirting back for days, in dance beats and fingertips against the soft inner elbow skin, flinches and walks faster, so fast Nakia cannot keep up. 

"Where he grew up, what you did would have put him in very great danger. It would have shamed him, and his enemies would have taken advantage," she explains, finally. T'Challa scoffs a little in disbelief.

"I touched his arm!"

"It was too gentle, my love. Touch that like, between men, it has to happen in private only. That's how they do it there."

"Ach, in  _ private _ ." He groans, and she can't help wrinkling her nose in agreement. This word, 'private', has come up so many times in the short months that the three of them have been together. Everything is 'private' in America, apparently. Even the most innocuous words of affection, or a simple smile, can cause Erik such squirming embarrassment simply by happening outside of the bedroom door. 

"Shall I come with you to talk it out?" she offers after they've sat in silence a while longer. T'Challa sighs and shakes his head, rising to his feet. 

"No, I can handle it myself." Speaking of words that she is tired of hearing in their relationship.

She sees him off to Erik's room and then goes about her own business for the day. Appropriate compartmentalization is part of her training and expertise, so her thoughts don't stray to her loves as she fields messages from her Oakland program manager, leads a cultural translation workshop for a promising new outreach team, and conducts check-ins with several embedded war dogs in refugee pipelines worldwide. As she finishes her evening meal, however, her mind does wander back, enough so that her footsteps take her to Erik's door instead of her own.

The room is dark when she cracks the door open, but there's a gentle, warm orange light by one side of the bed. T'Challa is using his kimoyo beads to read the novel by a contemporary Nigerian author that he has been trying to finish for three weeks (the life of a king, more duties than there are hours in the day). He's wearing his glasses, delicate silver half-rims. Next to him Erik is almost invisible under the sheet, just a fluff of dreadlocks peeking out, and his arm resting across T'Challa's hips. 

Nakia smiles. She crosses to the closet, brushing a kiss over T'Challa's temple as she goes, and disrobes. Her clothes go into the hamper, and she fetches one of several kitenge clothes she has stored in Erik's closet, wrapping it around her and tying it loosely at her chest she likes to do when she sleeps. Then she slides into bed next to Erik. He shifts as he feels her warmth and turns his face towards her with a fuzzy, mostly-asleep mumble of "Hey, baby." The simple affection in his tone confirms her conclusion: they worked it out, at least enough that they can rest easy tonight.

"Hello my love," she responds, and allows him to curl his other arm over her thigh, possessive and comfortable. "T'Challa, come, put out your light and sleep."

"Ten pages left…"

"They'll be here in the morning."

"Ah, is that so?" He won't have time in the morning for reading and then both know it, but he huffs in amused capitulation and douses his light. 

It's several days later that the matter comes up again. A particularly knotty problem has held T'Challa up with the Council of Elders all day--the Border Tribe wants to expand the grazing land for their communal cattle and increase the size of the herd, and the environmental, economic, and social ramifications of such a proposal require careful discussion--and when he gets out he makes straight for Nakia's workspace, the strain of hours of minute details and heated debate showing around his eyes though his calm smile remains in place. 

They both see how that smile flickers, dims, and then struggles back up when he rounds the corner of her office and sees Erik there, his arm casually draped over her shoulders as she finishes a call on her beads.

"Next week then. Yes. Thank you Ayo." She finishes the call quickly, trying not to let her haste make her rudely abrupt, but the damage is already done. Erik's arm drops. T'Challa's smile no longer has any joy behind it.

"What?" Erik's chin juts, defensive in that particularly aggressive way he has. "Was there something I missed, Your Highness? I didn't get the 'step off' memo."

"I'm not angry that you're close with her." 

"Yeah, you don't look angry." Erik rolls his eyes. Nakia is of a similar opinion, honestly; T'Challa is not doing a great job of hiding the clench in his forearms and the grind in his teeth. She wishes he'd just admit it. Instead, however, she watches him pull on yet another mask, one easily as all-concealing as the Panther's: the remote, distant face of the king.

"I'm sorry to have interrupted." He turns, and makes for the door. Erik makes a little choking noise that appears to be pure exasperated rage. Nakia sighs and raises her beads to her mouth.

"Shuri, engage protocol Close the Box."

Nakia smiles as the door to her office slams shut and locks, instantly. T'Challa halts, blinking, and his home system bead lights up as it tries to open the door. It doesn't budge.

"Copy that, the cat is trapped," comes a gleeful voice from Nakia's beads, and then muffled giggling that continues until she cuts the connection. When T'Challa turns back around he's smiling, though it's clearly against his will. 

"You conspired with my sister?"

"Always." Nakia points to a chair by her desk; he obligingly sits down. She shoves Erik in the arm, and he hisses but obediently takes a couple of grudging steps forward until they're face-to-face. "T'Challa.  _ Say  _ what you feel. It's not fair, this skirting around things."

He struggles with it a moment longer, mouth working, then nods as if accepting the truth of that. When he looks up from his hands--still clenched--to meet Erik's eyes, T'Challa's are sad and resigned in a way that hurts Nakia's heart.

"You don't need to be with me to be with her, you know. It's all right to just let our part of this...go."

"What?" Erik takes a step back as if the words were a physical blow. If T'Challa is resigned, Erik is blindsided, and that hurts her heart as well; she knows how much of life he's spent braced for disappointment and betrayal. This open shock says a lot about how many of those wary barriers he has, already, put aside for them. "Are you kidding me? You're...what,  _ half _ -dumping me? 'Yeah, you and I aren't working out, but it's cool, keep dating my future queen'?"

"Is that not what you want?"

"No! Jesus, why the fuck would you think--"

"I can't see any other way to interpret--" T'Challa reaches out, hands open and inviting; Erik flinches backwards, out of range of his fingers. "--this. You don't want me to  _ touch  _ you."

It's the gutted way he says it that truly brings the point home. She sees it land in Erik's eyes, and the next moment he's taken two sharp steps forward, hauled T'Challa up out of the chair, and slammed their mouths together so hard they both stumble. They hit the wall with a 'thump' that resounds through the whole room. Nakia doesn't jump in surprise; she'd be lying if she said she hadn't anticipated this was how it might go.

T'Challa's hands come up to frame Erik's face, one on his cheek and the other cupping the back of his neck, trying to hold him there and gentle their kiss at the same time. She sees the full-body shiver that elicits--Erik always seems to feel things with his every muscle. Then, to her surprise, he raises his hands and cups T'Challa's face right back. He pulls back a scant inch, so that their mouths are still sharing breath, eyes locked.

"I get it," he says, low and halting, the closest she's ever heard him to soft. "I get how it looks to you, what you see. But you don't get how it feels, man. On the inside. How much I want to be the guy who does f-- _ sappy _ shit like kiss your cheek, and how fucking disgusted it makes me feel at the same time. I'm  _ not  _ that guy. Maybe I could be, some day, but right now I can't--I can't  _ do  _ that."

He pulls T'Challa's face towards him again, presses a desperate, lingering kiss to his mouth. 'This, I can do' is so clear it doesn't need saying. When they part again T'Challa's eyes open slowly, and in them she sees that his hurt is gone and compassion has taken its place. It always does, with him. 

"No one here thinks the things you think they do. The words, the...mockery, whatever it is, none of it is real." Erik makes a huffing sound of protest, and T'Challa smothers it with his lips, gentle and insistent. "Easier to know than to believe, I understand. But it's the truth. Your...manhood, your honor, whatever it is you so fear, none of it is in danger from this."

Erik hisses like that pains him. "Listen, I'm trying, okay? I'm trying to...put it down. To give up what I gotta give up to be like that with you. Until then, it's just...it's easier with her. But that's...that's on me. My damage. I want you. I swear, I fucking  _ swear  _ I do."

"As do I." T'Challa is taking full advantage of this rare moment of Erik allowing closeness, holding him in with a hand spread over his neck and nuzzling their foreheads together. Another full-body shiver from Erik, as T'Challa's hands flex on him with steady reassurance. The tension goes out of the both of them. They breathe. "And I will be patient, knowing that you are trying. N'Jadaka." 

"Pfft, you're cheating breaking out the name," Erik mumbles, but he's smiling, and he doesn't pull back from the embrace, either.

Nakia lets them have a long, quiet moment, standing there together, before she crosses the room to join them. "I hope you don't think it's too easy, with me?" she asks, and Erik's eyes dart to her immediately at her teasing tone.

"Never," he vows, that wide, troublemaker's grin breaking across his face. She needs only beckon with one finger before he is bending down, pressing a kiss to her upturned lips and then, daringly, to the side of her neck as well. 

"Ah-ah, settle down," she commands, and he subsides, though the grin remains. "Let me be clear," she hardens her voice a little bit, just enough to catch their attention. It's hers, instantly. "I'm not the glue between you two, all right? That's not what this is about."

"Understood." T'Challa cups a hand under her elbow and bends to press warm lips to her cheekbone, eyes serious. "If anything, my love, I think you are simply the only one of the three of us who clearly knows her own mind." 

"Well that's certainly true," she agrees, laughing. "Now, go away; I have at least three more hours of work today, and you've occupied my office long enough."

"As you command, my queen." Erik flourishes a bow as T'Challa tows him towards the door (which slides open this time at his touch, with no evidence of the prior recalcitrance). 

"I'm not queen!"

"Yet," T'Challa adds, smugly, as she shuts the door in his face. She can't even muster the pretence of annoyance at this long-running argument, because as the door closes, she sees that his hand, around Erik's wrist, is holding warm and strong.


End file.
